• Irayda Jakusovaite and Zilvinas Darulis.
• Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Kaunas University of Medicine, A. Mickeviciaus 9, 44307 Kaunas, Lithuania. filosof@kmu.lt
• Medicina (Kaunas). 2004 Jan 1;40(9):825-32.

AbstractDiscussions about the goals of medicine and health care have significantly increased through the last decade of the past century. This was determined by the highly increased extent of health care, scarce health care resources, fundamental changes of health care technologies and well-established market relationships in health care. For a long time medicine attempted to achieve three main goals: to save and prolong life, fight and prevent diseases, reduce pain and sufferings. In the result of development of medicine the previous goals became rather problematic. Technological progress of medicine of the second half of the 20th century has implemented the believing, that medicine is able to prolong the life of human without restrictions. Ageing population has started expecting from medicine not only the saving of life and health enhancement, but also prolonging of life, since the mentioned is tended to be more socioeconomic, not medical, problem. Nowadays discussion about the goals of health care comes from the doubts, if the questions for medicine really have medical background. Often the society tries to escape from number of social problems medicalizing them. Spiritual and social problems of human are often supposed to be as medical ones, thus it is crucial to separate the main goals of medicine, which represent its values and targets, from the secondary ones, related to social or individual welfare, crime, dilemmas of poverty or morality. The aim of the article is to reveal the key values of medicine and health care, which determine the goals of medicine and health care.

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